EVENTS

#RDFbullies

Update May 21 see update below.

Oh good god. Really?

Three posts on CFI about the Women in Secularism Conference – May 17-19

That’s on the Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science website.

But we’re the bullies. Never forget that. We use our immense ruthless power as bloggers to argue with other bloggers, while poor tiny powerless meek obscure humble shoemaker Richard Dawkins simply tries to stamp Rebecca Watson into the ground a little bit more by re-posting Ron Lindsay comparing her to North Korea.

We’re the bullies. How does that work again?

And no those are not “three posts about the Women in Secularism Conference” – that’s false advertising. They’re three posts about Ron Lindsay’s dislike of feminism and then his fury at uppity women who dislike his thrusting of his dislike of feminism on a conference that wasn’t meant to be about his dislike of feminism. Those posts aren’t about the conference at all. You won’t find out by reading them that Maryam Namazie was a speaker and on a panel about leaving religion. You won’t read anything about Rebecca Goldstein’s talk or Katha Pollitt’s or Susan Jacoby’s. You won’t see anything about Debbie Goddard or Jamila Bey or Amanda Marcotte. The posts are not about the conference! They’re about spite and anger.

There’s nothing about the conference on the website. Do a search and the above item is the only one you’ll find.

Brilliant. I guess Ron was so pleased with the results of his three blog posts at the conference itself that he felt it would be even better to trash the conference afterwards with the help of Dawkins. What’s he going to do for an encore? Post photoshops of all the speakers? Is it heads on goats time?

Update May 21 No, that last para is not right, because Ron didn’t ask RDF to publish those posts.

Also, I of course know perfectly well that he wouldn’t actually post photoshops of all the speakers. On the other hand – if you had asked me, I would have said he would never attribute “the most intellectually dishonest piece of writing since the last communique issued by North Korea” to one of the speakers, either. I would never have guessed beforehand that he would write a thing like that about a speaker at a CFI conference. So, yes, in a sense I know he wouldn’t post photoshops of us, but in another sense, I don’t really know that I do know that. Yet I feel as if I do know it, hence phrasing it as “I know perfectly well that” he wouldn’t.

At any rate, I freely admit that was hyperbole. But then so was North Korea, and I’m not the CEO of anything.

It’s pretty rude of Lindsay to continue to undermine another organisation’s conference for days at a time, deliberately pushing his criticisms out to an ever wider audience. I mean, the organisation you’re CEO of doesn’t want to host Women in Secularism and its not your job to promote it and its successful aspects, OK but it’s quite unprofessional to be so meanspirited about another organisation’s efforts.

Sorry to post again, but I really just can’t get over the fact he is the CEO of the organisation he’s going out of his way to undermine to as big as audience as possible. To not promote the rest of the (highly successful according to every attendee I’ve heard report back) conference and bring that to the attention of the global RDF audience when he has the chance. Regardless of the merits of his statements, this is really not OK behaviour for a CEO or other office bearer of an organisation.

I have long argued that there isn’t a skeptical, atheist, humanist, or secular “community” that includes “both sides” of the current schism over misogyny and sexism at the same time. Greta Christina puts it far better than I ever could:

I don’t give a shit about the common ground I share with these people. The common ground of “we both don’t believe in God” is a whole lot less important to me than our differences: the difference that they think it’s okay to call women cunts and I do not, the difference that they think I should be ignored because I’m ugly or a whore and I do not; the difference that they think it’s okay to persistently harass and threaten people and I do not; the difference that they think it’s okay to hack into my private email lists and I do not; the difference that they hope I get raped and I do not; the difference that they want me to fuck myself with a knife and I do not.

So why should we still belong to the same organizations? As I have stated previously, I like the idea of A+ precisely because it alienates all the people I want nothing to do with. If I’m ever going to support a skeptical/atheist/humanist/secular organization financially again, those who care about feminism and social justice in general will have to start it themselves (Secular Woman comes to mind). The CFI, The JREF, The RDF, The Skeptic’s Society, or anyone associated with them have disqualified themselves for the rest of eternity, and then some…

Delurking to say that: so long as this shit goes on I see no reason to try and get active with skeptic/athiest groups or conferences in my area or even online. It’s glaringly obvious that being a woman my voice will not be accepted in good faith or, hell lets face it, even so much as aknowledged unless all that comes out of my mouth is “baa baa baa”

Furthermore I thank a lot of the bloggers on this network (which I’ve lurked in for at least a year now) for refusing to back down and stop posting about the very real problems facing these ‘movements’ (can we really call it a movement anymore when so many of the leading voices are spouting such backwards rhetoric?). I remain optimistic that someday the rest of the world’s athiests/skeptics will start to catch up with your ideas and when that day comes I will be ready and armed with all the knowledge documented here to educate and promote a skeptic/athiest movement that is more accepting and embracing for everyone and not just those who are white and male. But I am still waiting for that day and until it arrives I will keep reading and educating myself.

Thank you again, oh just about everyone who posts at all here. The bloggers, the commenters and especially the trolls, to badly paraphrase Rorschach from Watchmen: You think we’re feeding you? We aren’t feeding you, YOU are feeding US.

1) I’m still amazed that a man who was asked to give an introductory talk at a conference on women can then complain about being silenced.

2) Okay, nobody is posting about the conference, but only about the controversy; turn the tables. Post HERE about the conference. Tell us what was said at the talks described as being so wonderful–I’d really like to know, and I can’t be the only one.

Why does the other side of this weird altercation always get to set the agenda for discussion? Once they’ve been called on it, we could go back some discussion of the substance of the conference, maybe. That would be really good. Are they going to publish proceedngs?

Coincidentaly, I also have not frequented, nor followed RDF at least since 2009, and Richard, or at least his eponymous website has gone down hill. First it was Russell Blackford, then Richard Dawkins. Look out PZ! If I stop being a regular follower and member of your site….oh wait, I’ve always been more of an interested onlooker/smart arse occasional commenter. You’re safe, carry on….

Richard Dawkins simply tries to stamp Rebecca Watson into the ground a little bit more by re-posting Ron Lindsay comparing her to North Korea.

Yeah because Rebecca Watson has nuclear bombs ballistic missiles /rockets that occassionallyeven work, starves millions of people to death and completely controls the lives of .. (quick wikipedia check) twenty four million people restricting their access to any other form of contact or communication with the outsdie world ..Oh wait!

(Do I really need a /Sarc tag?)

My first reaction to hearing of this was : WTF!?!?!

Y’know it actually still is.

Doubling and tripling down and melting down online again? I .. don’t ..just .. huh .. what ..have some people learned nothing?

This is why we should support a new movement. This is why A+ and skepticism that does not exclude religion and social justice issues are so important. The old guard of the s/a movement have stymied and embarrassed their movement and are actively driving decent people away while they welcome creeps and bigots. Let them. They’re quickly becoming irrelevant and they don’t want us to stop them. OK. Message received. Don’t let their failure quench your passion. Try to hold on to it and redirect it. I think it’s worth it.

C’mon guys. You people are like desperate morons clinging to a lawnmower that has ran out of fuel.

Bloggers are leaving you. The community has turned against you. Feminists have turned against you. Conferences have turned against you.

You get hostile receptions where ever you go. You have to hide behind asinine block bots on Twitter because your bullshit keeps on getting called out. Ophelia has to keep producing childish posts because she keeps on getting owned. Watson is a bully and a liar. PZ the same. Svan a defender of a thug. You people are responsible for intimidating feminists, including some who have now admitted they are frightened of speaking out.

Stay classy, losers.

PS – The Slymepit has cut you down to size. It will finish FTBlogs off, once and for all.

In fact, we’d all appreciate it. I, for one, want to start completely ignoring the likes of you in favor of people who have demonstrated they actually have brains. And empathy. And even the slightest, merest sliver of a shred of simple human decency.

Why don’t you go away until you can find some of that? That way, the adults can talk.

@22 …”morons”, “losers”, use of violent rhetoric, and somehow Freethought Blogs are the bullies? How could you be so disconnected from reality? Even disconnected from your own words?

Personally, I’d rather donate to another group than CFI over this, as long as Ron Lindsay is their CEO. I’ve always assumed folks like Vacula save their true opinions for anonymous hate-filled tirades, and after seeing Ron Lindsay’s follow-up posts I’m starting to suspect the same of him. In other words, his fumbled North Korea reference is likely still a polite version of his honest opinion.

C’mon guys. You people are like desperate morons clinging to a lawnmower that has ran out of fuel.

Bloggers are leaving you. The community has turned against you. Feminists have turned against you. Conferences have turned against you.

You get hostile receptions where ever you go. You have to hide behind asinine block bots on Twitter because your bullshit keeps on getting called out. Ophelia has to keep producing childish posts because she keeps on getting owned. Watson is a bully and a liar. PZ the same. Svan a defender of a thug. You people are responsible for intimidating feminists, including some who have now admitted they are frightened of speaking out.

Stay classy, losers.

PS – The Slymepit has cut you down to size. It will finish FTBlogs off, once and for all.

People are asking you to leave, so I’m actually a bit hesitant asking this, but I really want to see evidence of this.

Women in Secularism is CFI’s most popular conference. It seems that more and more feminists are joining Freethought Blogs. It’s the Slymepit that seems small in comparison.

So I need to see citations and numbers. And Alexa ratings mean fuck-all, BTW… those are constantly in flux and change all the time.

I’m curious about the citations you’ve got, there. Are you pulling this out of your ass, or can you support your statements, like a good skeptic, with evidence?

The remarkable thing is, none of you seem to have evidence; when asked, you always obfuscate and insult and evade. Maybe you’ll be different?

@FTBisaShambles, LOL! Did you get your talk from Commander “End Times” Tuvok? He was certainly predicting the imminent demise of FTBs well over a year ago. I guess like any good “End Times” preacher you just keep pushing it out… Any day now… Any day now…

As for CFI… I’m going with Amanda Marcotte on this one; CFI is a brilliant organization that has done shit-tons of good for secularism and skepticism and atheism. Every organization has bad apples, and what we need to do now is wait and see how CFI handles theirs. I’m not willing to throw out CFI yet, because I want to see what they do, first. My feelings towards CFI are very much dependent on what they do going forward.

So we’ll see. what happens from here forward all depends on CFI. They are very much in the spotlight, now. They have some very hard decisions to make going forward.

What will ultimately make my decision on CFI is very simple: will they host a third Women in Secularism conference?

Yes, I too think #22 is Tuvok. He always says that “you’re dying, dying, and we are triumphing” nonsense.

No of course he doesn’t have evidence. It’s bullshit. I have access to the stats.

Yes there’s turnover but as noted, new people join. We add new bloggers slowly and carefully. If we wanted to just add Mass Quantities to impress the tuvoks, we could do that, but we don’t want to, so we don’t.

Don’t blame CFI for this. They’re good people. Ron was acting on his own.

believe me. I understand completely. And I’m not saying you shouldn’t feel that way. It may very well be true that CFI stands behind Ron, in which case, that’s their loss, not ours.

But maybe CFI will have that sea-change.

I think CFI needs to be given a chance to decide and map out how to deal with this. This is why I’m staying neutral on CFI specifically.

Also remember that there are tons of branches of CFI that are utterly against what Ron did, too. Consider, for example, CFI Ottawa, headed by Dear Ania. The board is all women, all of them feminists. They still deserve support, and I say that not just because I met Ania at WiS.

What the main CFI does at this point has yet to be seen, but it would not surprise me if even now there was a very long and hard conversation being had amongst the board. I’ll be watching CFI very closely from this point forward, to see what happens. I suggest we all do the same.

Impolitic.

That’s the word that make all the difference in what happens going forward.

Don’t blame CFI for this. They’re good people. Ron was acting on his own.

I will blame them (i.e. the org. and its board) if they don’t denounce him. He ought to be forced to apologise (a real apology, not a notpology) to the participants and organisers of WiS2 at the very least. Preferably, he should resign as CEO.

I also think the organisers of WiS should look out for another sponsor and divorce themselves from CFI unless Lindsay is replaced with someone who is willing to support it as one of CFI’s goals.

In fact, I’m kinda thinking that a lack of official response by CFI and the fact that Lindsay’s posts still remain on their site at this point, days after they were first posted, says all you need to know about CFI. Would there be this kind of condonation if Lindsay had been pro-racist or anti-Semitic instead of anti-feminist? I don’t think so.

I’m baffled as how people who call themselves “critical thinkers”, “skeptics”, who, I think, for the most part are Metaphysical Naturalists, and so don’t believe in contracausal free-will, can find the concept of ‘privilege’ controversial.
And behave as if “critical thinking”, “skepticism”, were magic spells.

Tuvok of course doesn’t tell us when Tuvok posts under other names, but I get comments like #22 quite regularly and they echo things Tuvok says when typing as Tuvok. That stupid triumphalist “we are going to bury you” bullshit is very Tuvok.

Ah, more road apples of wisdom from the Slime Pit.
We’re shake’n in our shoes #22. What ever will we do without the support of people like you?

I mean, aside from be much happier and get more done.

Again, if that’s who JREF, RDF and CFI’s CEO want to cater to, they are more than welcome to them. I’ll be staying on this side of the rift, thanks. Even if this were the road less traveled, it would be the best road to take.

I don’t pretend to know what the power structure is at CFI, and it’s probably difficult to just oust a CEO, but silence = approval in this case. Someone over there ought to be shouting, “Some of us think he was a complete asshat, and we’re trying to fix the situation; please bear with us while we do official things we can’t talk about.”

The longer it takes, the worse it looks, and the more thorough the solution will need to be. If Lindsay had soon apologized, lots of people could have tolerated him remaining CEO and still supported CFI. But continuing to dig the hole, and now getting Dawkins’s foundation to provide a backhoe and drilling rig, is causing a sinkhole to open under CFI.

I’m with Kevin and Ibis on this one. As long as Ron works for them as CEO and no official apology is forthcoming, they are written off. Dawkins writes some good books and his org does some good work too. I don’t care. He’s helped make this community toxic and I cannot support him or anything with his name attached to it. If the other employees are so awesome and CFI is not represented by the things Ron is saying, then I expect them to do something to definitively demonstrate that.

I made you a Bingo Card
And I think I need to tweet some hugs @Meldoy Hensley for whom I’m feeling really sorry. It must hurt very much to have your boss destroy the wonderful work you did.
There#s a saying in German “Was andere aufbauen schubst er mit dem Arsch um” “What other build he knocks over with his ass” Describes Lindsay perfectly…

Well they certainly give the impression Ron did the republishing there, what with his name hyperlinked under it in the style of an actual author of the blog. If you’re republishing something you usually have your own name in the template author field and who wrote the article in field. Someone went out of their way to create an author ID on the blog for RL. So … that’s pretty poor Internet form from them if they didn’t bother to ask.

The move WiS from CFI meme doesn’t take into account the fact that Melody Henson, who is a CFI employee, has been largely responsible for getting this conference going. I’ll support WiS wherever and however Melanie wishes. However, if Lindsay doesn’t apologize, I’ll want to be damned sure the money is going to Melanie’s account, not his.

On a less serious note, I’m very sorry to disagree with SallyStrange and to agree instead with Matt Yglesias that Tuvok was a boring, one dimensional character. Rather like the Pitter who uses his name (among others).

Nate @46: Though we did meet (at the hotel restaurant), I don’t think CFI ever came up in conversation, which as I recall ranged from cognitive science to cognac, coffee, chocolate, cilantro and pine-nuts.

Perhaps this is dreaming in technicolour, but I really wish there were some way to get the word out that we had an amazing conference, with much awesomeness among both speakers and attendees (while simultaneously addressing the unpleasant fallout of the opening speech and subsequent events).

Makes it worse that I should have made the connection considering the polo you were wearing, but then I never claimed observational skills as a particular talent…

Perhaps this is dreaming in technicolour, but I really wish there were some way to get the word out that we had an amazing conference, with much awesomeness among both speakers and attendees (while simultaneously addressing the unpleasant fallout of the opening speech and subsequent events).

Yeah! It was amazing and otherwise CFI put on a brilliant conference. That’s the thing… CFI needs to be watched very closely now because I’m not willing to… as they say… throw the baby out with the bathwater. It wouldn’t surprise me if the reason they’ve been silent so far is because they’re in meetings to figure out what to do. We’ll see what happens…

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